Prejudice of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA)

Our Sunday mornings began with the smell of a big breakfast. Our traditional Sunday “worship” took place in our kitchen. We worshiped each other and thanked the adult income-makers for providing us all with good food, a roof over our heads, and all the comforts we never took for granted. Sunday breakfast was a time for planning the upcoming week (we all brought our calendars to the table), discussing the events of the past week, distributing allowances, enjoying good food, and a lot of jo...

 Production Costs for Antimatter

Fermilab produces antiprotons in medium-energy collisions of protons with a lithium target. Every now and then these collisions will produce an antiproton, which is then directed into the storage ring beneath the buffalo. When operating at average efficiency, Fermilab can produce about 50 billion antiprotons an hour in this way. Assuming that the Antiproton Source is operating about 75 percent of the time throughout the year, this is about 6000 hours of operation per year, so Fermilab produce...

 Computers and Creative Writing

And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers to create a submission that was accepted for a technical conference (in fact, the organizers invited the “author” to chair a panel), but the abstract was simply a series ...